How a $20 MVP Has Made Me $X0,000

Thesis: At some fixed price point, people are willing to invest in building an MVP.

After getting some leads (and projects), over the space of a few months, from HN and talking to many people (from Twitter and HN), a few things jumped out at me.

The $5K price point is perfect for what I want to do. It is high enough to weed out people that would likely not value what I bring to the table. It is low enough to reduce friction to get potential customers to say ‘Yes’. It also provides the perfect jumping off point for larger projects. I tried other price points too, from $3K to $7K to $10K. $5K works best for MVPs.

Fixed budget & timeline work well - leaving variable scope (to be negotiated with the client). Given that this is an MVP, that works well - because the focus should be on the core ‘viable product’ portion of the MVP. So bells & whistles need to be cut.

Targeting customers that know what an MVP is, also helps to improve the quality of clients I interact with. They don’t want a web page that their cousin’s son-in-law’s first cousin can build for them, when s(he) is not fixing computers. They want helping figuring out what is their MVP and how should they build it.

The next decision I had to make was….what will my landing page do? Given that I am a Rails dev, will it be a Rails App? I spoke to a few trusted colleagues and got a variety of responses. Some feedback I got was that I should build a minimalist Rails App that handles the entire engagement (i.e. someone fills out a form, and it pushes that form down a funnel and has all these nice features that allow them to pay easily and keep track of the project as it progresses).

I liked the idea at first, but it didn’t quite sit well with the notion of an MVP. What kept playing in a loop in my head is that I needed to validate the $5K MVP idea before devoting any significant development time to building an app for it.

So I bought a theme from Themeforest (roughly $20) and decided to go meta. Make as minimal an MVP as I can, that validates my hypothesis.

I have one call to action button which is a simple ‘mailto:’ button - that launches your email client. Perfect? No…..but it gets the job done. People that want an MVP built, don’t want to have to interact with a fancy system. They just want the quickest and easiest way to get in touch with me. Email is that way.

I worked on the copy, got my portfolio together and just put it together in a day or 2.

I have gotten multiple projects directly from 5KMVP - at least 1 of which is a multiple of a 5KMVP. It is a multi-phase project that is broken up into manageable chunks.

The best thing about this experiment is that 5KMVP is proof positive of me eating my own dogfood. It is also a “successful” case study, about correctly deciding what your MVP should be based on what your business goals are.